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The surface of steel sheets used in the metal-forming process discussed in this article was textured by a laser-ablation technique. Differently shaped craters are formed in a patterned structure on the steel surface by controlling the pulsed-laser power density, pulse-repetition rate, and pulse duration. Lasertex sheets formed by this process have unique friction characteristics because of the uniform surface roughness and valley-biased topography. The friction of lasertex sheets was studied using a metal-forming bench test rig. Influencing factors, including surface roughness and sliding velocity, were studied under lubricated conditions. The friction of lasertex sheets was compared with that of shot-blasted sheets. The results showed that the coefficient of friction of the lasertex sheet under dry friction decreases with an increase in surface roughness and changes little with varying sliding velocity. With lubrication, the coefficient of friction of the lasertex sheet rises with an increase in surface roughness and decreases with an increase in sliding velocity. Lasertex sheets were found to have lower friction coefficients than shot-blasted sheets over the rage of surface roughness and sliding velocity investigated.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors are indebted to G. Chen, Y. Yang, and A. Xu for their help in the stimulating discussions and experiments, and to X. Wu for his help with the optical microscopy. The authors are also grateful to M. McMillan for his advice and valuable comments.
Presented at the ASME/STLE Tribology Conference in Long Beach, California October 24-27, 2004
Final manuscript approved December 3, 2004 Review led by Emmanuel Ezugwu